Evaluate and Assess your SAP BusinessObjects Environment

Your organization relies on your ability to deliver information on demand. It's a simple fact. But over time, systems evolve. They shift under the stresses of new user population demands, multiple development cycles, and reporting requirement changes.

That’s why we developed our SAP BusinessObjects Health Check Assessment; so you can identify weaknesses in your environment before they turn into big problems.

Our Health Check Assessment Package will help ensure that your organization is making the most of its business intelligence investment, that the system is performing as efficiently as possible, and that your deployment is able to scale and respond to future business demands.

When is a Health Check Assessment recommended?

While a periodic SAP BusinessObjects Health Check Assessment is recommended for all deployments, it is especially essential when:

• The actual system usage has differed over time from the initial design
• The user population increases in scope or actual usage
• Performance and response times are not at expected levels, or are declining
• Development has been completed and a final check is required to ensure the system will function efficiently when delivered to the end-users
• Planning to migrate to a new platform or software version

What are some of the benefits you might realize?

Our SAP BusinessObjects Health Check is directed to discovery and documentation of the current system installation, with the deliverable being an accounting of system performance, and recommendations on how to best configure the environment for present and future requirements.

Specifically, our SAP BusinessObjects Health Check Assessment offers the benefit of:

• An independent review of your configuration and development to ensure that you are adhering to industry best practices
• Higher user satisfaction and increased user adoption
• More stability for your environment with increased reliability and up-time
• Better management of system, software and license resources
• Faster performance for reports and dashboards
• More robust security and auditing management
• A clear roadmap to move business intelligence forward to meet company-wide goals and objectives

What are some of the goals of performing a health check?

Our SAP BusinessObjects Health Check Assessment will provide your organization with detailed documentation and recommendations that will enable you to:

• Implement appropriate best practices
• Ensure scalability and growth of your SAP BusinessObjects and data warehouse environments
• Immediately improve the performance of your existing environment to maximize your investment
• Leverage a roadmap for meeting future business requirements
• Implement new techniques, tools or technologies to improve user satisfaction
• Increase data quality, consistency, reliability, and accuracy

How does it work?

Our iterative assessment begins with a kick-off meeting, followed by high-level meetings with key stakeholders. After tailoring our core methodology to meet the specific client needs, we interview administrators, developers and information consumers to gauge their perspective on the business intelligence environment. They're also invited to share any particular challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, based on the information gathered through meetings and interviews we perform an in-depth analysis and collect information on:

• SAP BusinessObjects Platform
  • Installation and configuration of client and server software
  • Application of appropriate Service Packs
  • Solution architecture
  • Server sizing, usage and performance
  • Security model and auditing functions
  • Backup and recovery strategy
  • Software license utilization
• Data Layer
  • Data connectivity including databases, web services, third-party systems, etc...
  • Structure and performance of data warehouse, data mart, ODS
  • Design and performance of associated ETL jobs
  • Data quality approach and execution
• SAP BusinessObjects Content
  • General development practices
  • Proper tool selection
  • Semantic layer (Universe) structure and intuitiveness
  • Reporting architecture and design
  • Dashboard architecture and design
  • High-level performance assessment
  • Investigation of known problem areas
• SAP BusinessObjects Operations
  • Administrator, developer and end-user skill gaps
  • Standard operating procedures and processes
  • Technical Support procedures
  • Vision, scalability and growth plans

What do we get out of the health check assessment?

The key deliverable of our SAP BusinessObjects Health Check Assessment is written documentation and an executive presentation that includes:

• Report of the current state of health of your business intelligence environment at each component level
• Scores for key universes, reports and dashboards using criteria established in our proprietary methodology
• List of recommendations where immediate changes can be implemented to address specific issues or shortcomings
• Training plan to address identified education skill gaps for administrators, developer and end-users
• Road map detailing specific actions to take for meeting the organizational vision for business intelligence and addressing future challenges